Laura Muir ready for Monaco test

LAURA MUIR heads to the Monaco Di­a­mond League meet­ing this week full of ex­cite­ment at go­ing back to one of her favourite race venues and charged with con­fi­dence that her in­jury wor­ries are in the past, writes Euan Crum­ley.

The 1500m Bri­tish record­holder’s prepa­ra­tions for her as­sault on a 1500m/5000m dou­ble at the IAAF World Cham­pi­onships was thrown into some doubt last month when it emerged that a scan had re­vealed a ‘heal­ing stress frac­ture’ in her foot.

Since her re­turn to ac­tion, how­ever, the 24-year-old’s body has re­sponded well and has stood up to a race sched­ule which saw her run a per­sonal best of 1:58.69 over 800m in Lausanne, come ag­o­nis­ingly close to break­ing the Bri­tish mile record in Lon­don (she did break the Scot­tish record) and se­cure vic­tory over a large field in Padova.

The fi­nal race stop in hon­ing her world cham­pi­onships prepa­ra­tions comes over

3000m in a strong field con­tain­ing the likes of Hellen Obiri, the Olympic 5000m sil­ver medal­list who beat Muir in the clos­ing stages at the Müller An­niver­sary Games.

The Kenyan looks like be­ing the one to beat in the 5000m at the Lon­don Sta­dium and Muir ad­mits she is rel­ish­ing the chance to com­pete against her again in Monaco.

“I’m re­ally ex­cited, ac­tu­ally,” says the Scot, who will head for fur­ther train­ing in Font Romeu fol­low­ing the race.

“It will be good to test the legs out over the longer dis­tance – it’s been a while since I ran that far!

“It’s a very good field, as well – prob­a­bly very sim­i­lar to the world champs fi­nal – so it will be a very good in­di­ca­tor as to where I’m at com­pared to the rest of the com­pe­ti­tion.

She added: “It’s a great com­pe­ti­tion. I’ve run there be­fore and have fond mem­o­ries of that track – it’s where I broke four min­utes (for 1500m) for the first time.

“It will be good to be in a com­pet­i­tive race with them

(the likes of Obiri) and see how I fare.”

As for her foot, Muir adds: “We had to build up the train­ing af­ter be­ing in the pool a lit­tle bit but it’s felt re­ally good, re­ally strong and I’m run­ning com­pletely nor­mally and pain-free now. I’m very con­fi­dent run­ning on it.”